Hot time in the city

Summer features its
best impression of Hades as we enter August. You feel like
you’re awakening from a bad, slow-moving dream, one in which
the cat has settled on your face, and you can’t wake up
enough to move it, but neither can you breathe. That’s the
way midsummer makes me feel.

Denver’s weather is
temperate, with few 100-degree days, unlike Tucson or even Boise.
Nor is it accompanied by the humidity that makes Chicago or Atlanta
oppressive. But in those years when the monsoon arrives late, and
the baked-potato heat lingers far into the nights, you find
yourself groggy, as if fighting a flu, occasionally turning surly.
You’re short on ambition, but feel too good to throw in the
towel. With due respect to Robert Frost, there’s no desire in
this fire.

Everyone has their limits. “Very hot and
dry again ... uggh,” wrote one correspondent from Silverton,
located at 9,300 feet in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. He
added: “Summer is for enduring.”

My endurance
ends at 84 degrees. With that, my office air conditioner goes on.
Others tolerate far more. An acquaintance who lives and works in an
apartment in central Denver said at 5 p.m. that it was 88 degrees,
with indoor temperatures likely to rise further yet. He has no air
conditioner. They’re expensive to operate, he said, and
“not good for the environment.”

The extent to
which we insulate ourselves from the natural environment is
remarkable. Even here during summer in the city, your back feeling
dirty and gritty, it’s useful to carry a jacket when visiting
stores and restaurants. With a flick of the air-conditioner dial,
it’s winter again. Nor is it just in hot cities. Air
conditioning, a luxury 50 years ago, today has become standard even
in mountain resorts such as Sun Valley, Telluride and Vail, where
summer -- at least before the climate shift began -- lasted barely
long enough to grow potatoes.

Winter brings the opposite.
Outside it can be freezing, but store doors remain wide open. For
those who can’t read signs, that means “open.”

Is this not a truly remarkable time in human existence?
We feel that our energy resources are so unlimited that we can turn
summer into winter, and vice versa. Some call it the festival of
fossil fuels. Others say that it’s like having 150 slaves,
but analysts say the gluttony cannot be sustained.

Supplies of natural gas have peaked, and prices are headed
inexorably upward. Summer’s transformation is different. The
icy cold of the pancake house down the street comes from
electricity, which is produced mostly by burning giant mounds of
coal. We’ll not run out of coal soon, especially here in the
carboniferous West. Just the same, we do have problems, of course,
among them the greenhouse gases coal produces.

Nineteen
years ago, Jim Hansen, a scientist from the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, boldly told Congress that those
greenhouse gases were fingerprints soon to show up on our climate.
It seems time has proven him correct. There is little quibbling
left about the gravity of evidence. Now, he says, we have until
about 2015 to turn the corner or risk unknown consequences. Carbon
is rapidly accumulating in the atmosphere. What is sobering is the
speed of it all. Most of the oil, gas and coal ever consumed by us
earthlings has been consumed during the last 55 years.

Some scientists say the challenge is one of engineering: using our
energy more efficiently, adopting non-carbon and renewable
energies, and devising strategies to store the unwanted carbon
emissions in underground caverns. Then there are the question marks
such as hydrogen and, in its own way, nuclear. What we need, they
say, is a big program – something along the lines of the
Apollo project, which put the first man on the moon.

Our
species is nothing if not inventive, as witnessed by our ability to
use a black rock to make popsicles. Maybe we can invent our way out
of this pickle of planetary pollution. Then again, maybe
we’re already just too clever by half with these absurd
artifices of winter-in-summer and summer-in-winter.

Here
in August, summer heat returns again by day, but it does not
linger. At night the crickets make their pulsing music, and the
tasseled ears of corn grow large. Life has become sweet and
pleasant once again. Summer has been endured once more.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He writes in the Denver area.

Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at [email protected].

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